Teach my lecturers to use Facebook

Maybe I shouldn’t write about this, my friends and classmates will kill me.

Last week I had a lunch with most of the teachers, lectures, professors and tutors in my department. The only reason for me being the only student in that lunch was that I was helping to set up the farewell party, so my teacher kindly invited me to join. I can’t remember how was the topic started, maybe we were talking about how to inform students by email, and I mentioned the word “Facebook“. It’s not completely new to them. They must have heard of it before from maybe friends or students. Anyway, they were very interested and started to ask questions. “What’s Facebook for”, “Why do you use it?” etc. No matter how I hard I tried to explain, I can’t get away the frown on their faces. And then suddenly one teacher suggested “Why don’t you show us this website after lunch?” I broke into a cold sweat for a few seconds, then realised “No” wasn’t a very good option.

After lunch we went back to a lecture room. A projector was set, and I was about to give a presentation to my lecturers on Facebook, a place where their students may have talked, or even joked about them. So my starting line was “Please be aware that we about to enter a very private website which may contain some very personal information”. They nodded while staring on the log-in page on the screen. At the second I signed in, I realised I’d got myself into a very wrong place. My profile picture with my girlfriend showed up, followed some party photos in which people looked seriously drunk. Also, some groups like “(teacher’s name) Appreciation Group” showed up as I scrolled down the page. The teachers looked at those contents very seriously, as if they were marking my essays. After a few clicks, I knew I was not supposed to go any further, so I finished my presentation very roughly. They still looked very curious but I guessed some of them still didn’t get the idea why such a website exists.

Actually it wasn’t as bad as I thought, but after the presentation, I had a deep thought about the privacy in Facebook and sites like that. I’m not a very active user on Facebook and I don’t normally write on other people’s wall but sent them message. I believe if someone really want to search you, it’s possible to know quite a lot of personal information, especially when you are an active member. I experienced several times when I went to a party and some people came up to me said “You are Richard, right? I thought you in Facebook”. I’ve been using the Internet for many years, and the longer I use, and less information I want to share on the web. I believe that the second you press “Send” or “Publish”, the information you send will stay there for ever and can no longer be 100% private, even it’s an email. Your future partner may see it, your bosses and co-workers may see it and even your kids. It’s not a big deal to tell your teachers that you are in Facebook, or tell them there is such a site exists. If they really want, they can dig it out anyway. But I would really be careful with the things I wrote on the Internet, no matter they are in a password protected SNS, or public blog.

There are some teachers joined already. And they added me as friends…